Taken from AMERICAN HEALTH July/August 1987.
How to problem-solve in your dreams
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Your dreams are "written" in your own private vocabulary; that's why their meaning is often unclear (and why dream books you buy at the corner newsstand won't explain your own visions). Moreover, the language of dreams is sensory and visual, whereas the language of daily life is verbal. You need to translate a dream much as you would a foreign language.
Unfortunately, the same force s that make us disguise problems in our dreams are likely to hinder our recognizing them when we're awake. Even Freud had trouble with self-analysis. So an impartial listener - attained therapist - can help. "It's a collaborative process," says New York
psychoanalyst Walter Bonime, author of the classic text, THE CLINICAL USE OF DREAMS (Da Capo Press, $29.50)
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't explore your dreams alone or with a partner. People who keep dream journals say that over time, patterns often emerge.
To put your dreams to work solving problems, try this routine:
o Program yourself to wake up after every REM period. I did it while writing this article simply by telling myself I wanted to at bedtime. But don't make it a regular habit. "The ability to maintain consciousness during sleep can backfire," says Dr. Neil Kavey, director of the
Columbia-Presbyterian sleep lab. "If you can't shut it off, you may have trouble remaining asleep, or you may sleep so poorly that you feel you didn't sleep at all."
o Put a notebook and pen or tape recorder at your bedside.
o At bedtime, select a problem and sum it up with a question, such as "Should I take this new job?" Write it down and list possible solutions.
o Turn off the lights and reflect on these solutions. Stick with it until you drift off to sleep.
o When you wake up - during the night or in the morning - lie still. To jog your memory, pretend you're a detective interviewing an eyewitness. What's the last thing you remember? Before that? Going backward can help you more easily reconstruct a dream.
o Write down or tape record all that you remember. Do it before you shower and have breakfast.
o If you have trouble catching dreams, try sleeping late on weekends The longest dreams occur in the last part of sleep and many of us cut sleep short on week nights.
Once you've recorded your dream, how do you decode it? Tell it to yourself in the third person, suggest psychologist Lillie Weiss in DREAM ANALYSIS IN PSYCHOTHERAPY (Pergamon Press, $11.95). This may give you some distance from the dream and help you see the actions more clearly. Then look at the part of the dream that is the most mysterious. "Frequently the most incongruous part provides the dream message," Weiss says.
In her dream-therapy study, Cartwright asks participants to examine and try to change repetitive, troublesome dreams along seven dimensions:
o Time orientation. Do all your dreams take place in the past? Try positioning them in the present or future.
o Competence to affect the outcome. Try finding a positive way to resolve a dream. o Self-blame. In your dreams, do you hold yourself responsible when things go wrong? Must you?
o Relation to former role: If your divorced, do you still dream of yourself as married? If you have lost your job, do you still see yourself at work? Consider alternatives.
o Motivation. Do you dream of being nurtured? Can you think of a way to take care of yourself?
o Mood. What would make a dream more pleasant?
o Dream roles: Do you like the part you play in your dreams? What role would you prefer?
. This following is an excerpt from "Psi Notes", prepared by William Braud, Ph.D., of the Mind Science Foundation in San Antonio, Texas.
Question: What percentage of a person's dreams are precognitive (foretell the future) and how can we recognize the difference between a precognitive dream and an ordinary dream?
Answer: A large proportion of precognitive experiences occur during dreams. One survey indicates that as many as 65 percent of precognitive experiences occurred during sleep. Precognitive dreams also seem to provide more complete and more accurate information than do waking psychic experiences.
. There's no way to know with certainty what percentage of our dreams are precognitive. The content of the majority of our dreams is probably quite mundane, involving replays of experiences of the day, perhaps some wish fulfillment, and maybe even "random" content. But now and then, dreamers do have accurate glimpses of the future as they sleep.
. The only way to know with certainty which dreams are precognitive and which are not is to keep a dream diary of all dreams and check to see which come true and which don't. Some persons are able to associate certain feelings of confidence in connection with psychic dreams - but these are very subtle feelings which are difficult to put into words and which may differ from person to person.
. Let me describe a program of research in which we are more certain about what's going on. This research program was initiated by a New York psychiatrist, Dr. Montague Ullman, as a result of his observation that he and his patients were sharing telepathic dreams in the context of psychotherapy. A dream laboratory was set up at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. Ullman, along with his associates Stanley Krippner and Charles Honorton, designed experiments in which persons spent the night in the dream lab. They were monitored electro-physiologically in order to detect physiological indications of dreaming - these indications include: an activated EEG, rapid eye movements, and reduced muscle tension. When these indications of dreaming occurred, the sleeper was awakened and asked to describe his dream. These descriptions were tape-recorded and later transcribed. The next day, a target experience was randomly selected and the subject then went through some waking sensory experience. What was discovered was that the sleeper was able to have accurate dreams about events of which no one was as yet aware at the time of the dream, but which were randomly selected the next day.